The Infrastructural Agency of Exhibition Spaces. How Memory is Produced Through Art on Display

• In Event: Exhibitions on Difficult Pasts and Their Infrastructures

Abstract

Drawing inspiration and concepts from infrastructure studies, the ANT theory, and materiality studies, the paper will focus on how exhibition spaces exercise their agency in shaping memory shows in museums and galleries. These spaces act as infrastructures of memory: in different modes and scopes, they enable and constrain the design, production, and installation of exhibitions that deal with the past, affecting their arrangements, narratives, and ways they are experienced. Exhibition spaces are not only defined by walls and other architectural divisions. They are complex assemblages of objects, technologies, standards, classifications and conventions of practice, including requirements for light and humidity, regulations for fire safety, surveillance, and accessibility, norms of social behaviour and experience scenarios.

Art practices, museums and galleries, with their traditions of site-specificity, institutional critique and “new institutionalism”, often experiment with exhibition spaces, exploring their hidden potentials and affordances, or exposing and overcoming their limitations and exclusions. In effect, the space where art objects and practices are exhibited can become visible as such, taking on aesthetic, semantic and affective values; sometimes it even turns into a memory artifact or reveals itself as such.

Using archival and ethnographic research on a series of contemporary art exhibitions in Poland that related to World War II, the Holocaust, and post-war forced migrations, the paper will show the changes, adaptations and additions that exhibition spaces imposed or suggested during the process of designing, producing, and installing the shows. It will also pay particular attention to situations in which artworks and experimental display approaches are transferred to historical and ethnographic museums. Finally, it will try to determine how this affects both the exhibition spaces of the latter, with their specific infrastructures, and artʼs potential for memory production.

Author

• Tomasz Załuski, U of Lodz (Poland)